Rethinking Virtual Link Mapping in Network Virtualization

Virtual Network Embedding (VNE) that addresses the embedding problems of heterogeneous virtual networks onto a physical limited-capacity infrastructure efficiently is a major challenge in network virtualization (NV). VNE is computationally intractable when considering various constraints on nodes and links, and is also known as NP-hard even in offline embedding. Although the VNE problems have received attentions over recent decades with a vast number of VNE solutions, the majority of them only focus on VNE node mapping, whilst leaving the link mapping stage for the shortest path method or multicommodity flow (MCF) algorithm. We persuasively argue that node and link mappings equally play pivotal roles to approach an efficient VNE solution. In this paper, we reassess the role of link mapping stage in VNE problem, and then propose a novel intelligent VNE orchestration which effectively implements a distributed parallel model to reduce the operation time remarkably. Extensive evaluation results show that our proposed algorithm is not only faster than state-of-the-art VNE algorithms in speed, but also better in all performance metrics.